[amsat-bb] Re: [Senior-officers] Ron Bracewell, SK

[Robert McGwier]

This is very sad indeed.  I met Bracewell and talked to him several 
times.  When Maureen Quirk figured out she could not get some FFT stuff 
through my thick head, she gave me Bracewell's book and it opened up the 
world to me.  I had never heard of a Hartley transform or a cosine 
transform and I had great new toys to work with.  I made it a point to 
get acquainted with him after this and thank him.  You can bet that 
almost everyone who has ever worked on the MPEG video compression 
techniques learned most of the Discrete Cosine Transform theory from 
Bracewell.

RIP
Bob



Tom Clark, K3IO wrote:
> Many of you know of Ron Bracewell, the Australian Radio Astronomer. I 
> have just learned of his passing at age 86; details can be read at 
> http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-bracewell-082207.html. Ron's 
> profession credentials at Stanford are summarized on his personal web 
> page at http://www-star.stanford.edu/people/bracewell.html
> 
> I met Ron as a young radio astronomer in the early 1960's, shortly after 
> he came to the US. He taught me about the beauty of the Fourier 
> Transform, and I have been forever in his debt since that first 
> encounter.Many of you have heard me refer to his McGraw-Hill textbook, 
> "/The Fourier Transform and its Applications/" (ISBN-13:978-0070070158, 
> see this entry on Amazon.com 
> <http://www.amazon.com/Fourier-Transform-Its-Applications/dp/0070070156>)as 
> THE bible to be learned and revered by anyone thinking about topics like 
> antenna arrays, image processing, holography, XRAY & MRI tomography, and 
> ... that share the Fourier Transform as their foundation.
> 
> Ron also was active in philosophical discussions about SETI (see, for 
> example http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/BracewellR.html); be 
> sure to read his 1975 book /The Galactic Club/.
> 
> Rest well, Ron. Your genius profoundly affected many lives!
> 
> Tom Clark
> //
> 


-- 
AMSAT Director and VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL,
TAPR, Packrats, NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR WG Chair
"If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or
else you're going to be locked up." Hunter S. Thompson